The Never give up man..Chris Gardner..His childhood.. early adulthood... marriage and troubles...

Chris Gardner..the man who never gave up..!!
He..when he was young..!

Gardner was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on February 9, 1954, to Thomas Turner and Bettye Jean Gardner. He was both the second child and the only boy born to Bettye Jean. His older half-sister, Ophelia, is from a previous union. His younger sisters, Sharon and Kimberly, are children from his mother's marriage to Freddie Triplett.

Gardner did not have many positive male role models as a child, as his father was living in Louisiana during his birth, and his stepfather was physically abusive to both his mother and his sisters. Triplett's fits of rage made both Gardner and his sisters constantly afraid. In one incident, Bettye Jean was falsely imprisoned when Triplett reported her to the authorities for welfare fraud; the children were placed in foster care. When Gardner was eight years old, he and his sisters returned to foster care for the second time when their mother, unbeknownst to them, was convicted of trying to kill Triplett by burning down the house while he was inside.

While in foster care, Gardner first became acquainted with his three maternal uncles: Archibald, Willie, and Henry. Of the three, Henry had the most profound influence on him, entering Gardner's world at a time when he most needed a positive father figure. However, Henry drowned in theMississippi River when Chris was nine years old. The children learned that their mother had been imprisoned when she arrived at Henry's funeral escorted by a prison guard.

Despite both her very unhappy marriage and her periods of absence, Bettye Jean was a positive source of inspiration and strength to her son Chris. She encouraged Gardner to believe in himself and sowed the seeds of self-reliance in him. Gardner quotes her as saying, "You can only depend on yourself. The cavalry ain't coming."Gardner also determined from his early experiences that alcoholism, domestic abuse, child abuse, illiteracy, fear, and powerlessness were all things he wanted to avoid in the future.

    Early Adulthood

Inspired by his Uncle Henry's worldwide adventures in the U.S. Navy, Gardner decided to enlist when he finished secondary schooling. He was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for four years, where he was assigned as a medical corpsman. He became acquainted with a decorated San Francisco cardiac surgeon, Dr. Robert Ellis, who offered Gardner a position assisting him with innovative clinical research at the University of California Medical Center and Veterans Administration Hospital in San Francisco. Gardner accepted the position, and moved to San Francisco upon his discharge from the Navy in 1974. Over the course of two years, he learned how to manage a laboratory and to perform various surgical techniques. By 1976, he had been given full responsibility for a laboratory and had co-authored several articles with Dr. Ellis that were published in medical journals.

        Marriage and                 Troubles

On June 18, 1977, Chris Gardner married Sherry Dyson, a Virginia native and an educational expert in mathematics. With his knowledge, experience and contacts within the medical field, it appeared Gardner had his medical career plans laid out before him. However, with ten years of medical training ahead of him and with changes in health care just on the horizon, he realized that the medical profession would be vastly different by the time he could practice medicine. Gardner was advised to consider more lucrative career options; a few days before his 26th birthday, he informed his wife, Sherry, of his plans to abandon his dreams of becoming a physician.

His relationship with Sherry was detached, in part because of his decision to abandon a medical career and also due to differences in their behavior. While still living with Sherry, he began an affair with a dental student named Jackie Medina, and she became pregnant with his child only a few months into the affair. After three years of marriage to Sherry, he left her to move in with Jackie and to prepare for fatherhood. Nine years elapsed before he and Sherry were legally divorced in 1986.

Their son, Christopher Jarrett Gardner, Jr. was born on January 28, 1981. Gardner worked as a research lab assistant at UCSF and at the Veterans' Hospital after leaving the service. His position as a research lab assistant paid only about $8,000 a year, which was not enough for him to support a live-in girlfriend and a child. After four years, he quit these jobs and doubled his salary by taking a job as a medical equipment salesman.

Prompted by his son's inquiries about his own father, Gardner had previously been able to track down his biological father via telephone. With a higher income from his new job, Gardner was able to save enough money to travel to Monroe, Louisiana, where he and his son met his own father, Turner, for the first time.

Gardner returned to San Francisco determined to succeed at business. A pivotal moment in his life occurred, after a sales call to a San Francisco General Hospital, when he encountered an impeccably-dressed man in a redFerrari. Curious, Gardner asked the man about his career. The man told him he was a stockbroker and, from that moment on, Gardner's career path was decided. Eventually, Gardner bought a Ferrari of his own from Michael Jordan.The Illinois license plate of Gardner's black Ferrari reads "NOT MJ".

The stockbroker in the red Ferrari was a man named Bob Bridges. He met with Gardner and gave him an introduction to the world of finance. Bridges organized meetings between Gardner and branch managers at the major stock brokerage firms that offered training programs—such as Merrill Lynch, Paine Webber,E.F. Hutton, Dean Witter Reynolds andSmith Barney. For the following two months, Gardner cancelled or postponed his sales appointments and his car amassed parking tickets while he met with managers.

It appeared that Gardner got his "break" when he was accepted into a training program at E.F. Hutton. He subsequently quit his sales job so that he could dedicate his time exclusively to training as a stockbroker. Then he appeared at the office ready to work, only to discover that his hiring manager had been fired the week before. To make matters worse, Gardner's relationship with Jackie was falling apart. According to Gardner, the police witnessed an incident in which Jackie was running away with Chris Jr. and Gardner attempted to take the child back, but in the process swung Jackie into the garden bushes, which resulted in her being scratched. Gardner was apprehended initially for this incident, but an identity check on his car license plate led them to detain him for non-payment of parking fines. He was taken to jail and a judge ordered that he stay there, for ten days, as punishment for being unable to pay $1,200 in parking tickets. Jackie then took Chris Jr. away to live with her on theEast Coast, but she eventually decided not to press charges over the incident in which she was thrown into the bushes.

Gardner returned home from jail to find his apartment empty. With no experience, no college education, virtually no connections, and with the same casual outfit he had been wearing on the day he was taken into custody, Gardner gained a position in Dean Witter Reynolds' stock brokerage training program. However, this offered no salary; apart from selling medical equipment that brought in 300–400 dollars a month in the early 1980s, and with no savings, he was unable to meet his living expenses.


If you wanna see his work and career..where once he turns homeless and broke...and later becomes a millionaire...! Click here.


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